Here is the slide deck.

These appear to be only two real options:

Gathering Place

• Cost: $29USD/user/mo with no ongoing commitment and a 14 day trial.
• Pros: Simple, easy, loads quickly, draws faster than Webex, and allows the viewer to resize the screen they are viewing (to shrink it.) Includes voice calling inside the session. Minimal feature set (in this case, a plus.)
• Cons: The software crashes whenever I quit it on my Mac. They don’t know why. Minimal feature set. Limited kinds of sharing compared to Webex.

Webex Meeting Center

• Cost: $90USD/user/mo and requires a 12 month minimum commitment. What planet are these guys living on? I mean, the application is nice but I’m not sure it’s THAT nice.
• Pros: Full-featured application that lets you share a desktop, an application, a browser (when you go to a webpage, your viewers go to that webpage in THEIR browser – good for showing YouTube videos or high-bandwidth sites.)
• Cons: Expensive.

What about Gotomeeting.com or Microsoft LiveMeeting?

Gotomeeting can’t be hosted on a Mac. LiveMeeting can but only if you use Safari. Bleeeccchhh.

What about some of the new, lightweight conferencing applications?

Vyew is completely unusable and honestly just baffling. It doesn’t work properly on the Mac at all.
Yugma crashed when I tried it too.

This industry is AWFUL.

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world.  I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn’t be happier. I feel like I’m “home”.

Now that I’m out, I’m taking on a few different projects. I’m working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area – helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that – sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best “job” in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It’s going to be a crazy and fun year – I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn’t changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven’t spoken in a while and we’ll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

• Jeff Bezos
• a better question than “what’s changing in the next five years” is “what is going to be the SAME over the next five or ten years?” because that allows them to build a sturdy business.
• he talked about the current services: message queuing, storage, computing and fulfillment. They can take inbound data jobs, store your data, store your physical goods, and provide computing cycles. So what would they build next? He wouldn’t say but he did say: “when you build a house, you build from the ground up.”
• So what would they build next? I think that one of the next services they will offer is a billing platform for all of that so you can turn around and bill your customers for their usage of those services. But that’s just my opinion.
• Battelle interviewing Mena Trott, Joe Krause, and Jay Adelson (Digg)
• Krause: It’s relatively easy to find buyers who you can sell it to for $5M. Having a $10M business means having fewer buyers. Having a $50M business means that there are really only one or two potential buyers. This impacts whether or not you want to take VC money. Because if you are taking VC money, you need to go for much higher multiples (see below.)
• Joe Krause made an interesting point: You might want to sell and get a 5x or 6x return on the money which is good for you, and good for your employees. But your VC is thinking, “These guys might be the 100x opportunity.” So they’re not excited about your 5x return and can fight it. Interesting dynamic.
• Biggest mistakes: “What was your biggest mistake”?
• ****Krause: Not launching our business model at the same time as we launched our product. We launched the product and learned a lot about it for six months. But then we launched our business model six months later and had lost those six months – we didn’t learn anything about how people valued our application. Because you can’t have those conversations with people about value…until you are charging!
• Apollo / Kevin Lynch:
• COOL demo from Salescorce.com’s Apollo desktop. VERY nice. Same with the eBay Desktop application.
• WOW. Awesome word processor that is online/offline called Buzzword from Virtual Ubiquity. It does TABLES properly! For an HTML type text editor, that is unbelievable!

• The best time to start is when you’ve got enough money in the bank to support all contingencies.
• The best time to start is when the competition is far behind in technology, sophistication and market acceptance.
• The best time to start is when the competition isn’t too far behind, because then you’ll spend too long educating the market.
• The best time to start is when everything at home is stable and you can really focus.
• The best time to start is when you’re out of debt.
• The best time to start is when no one is already working on your idea.
• The best time to start is when your patent comes through.
• The best time to start is after you’ve got all your VC funding.
• The best time to start is when the political environment is more friendly than it is now.
• The best time to start is after you’ve got your degree.
• The best time to start is after you’ve worked all the kinks out of your plan.
• The best time to start is when you’re sure it’s going to work.
• The best time to start is after you’ve hired the key marketing person for the new division.
• The best time to start was last year. The best opportunities are already gone.
• The best time to start is before some pundit declares your segment passe. Too late.
• The best time to start is when the new generation of processors is shipping.
• The best time to start is when the geopolitical environment settles down.

Thanks Seth.

As part of the run-up to the conference, the team decided to hold a blog relay – “The Radar Relay” – where different writers would summarize the week’s Office 2.0 news at the end of the week. This is my week. But you might want to start here first if you haven’t been keeping up to date until now.

• Feb 23, 2007 / Richard McManus
• Feb 28, 2007 / Rod Boothby
• Mar 7, 2007 / Zoli Erdos
• Mar 9, 2007 / Stowe Boyd

 
Also, if you haven’t registered for Under the Radar yet, the readers of this blog can take advantage of a special price at this link. I’ll be there, to see what the judging panel think of the selections that our committee made, and also to give a brief talk about Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

On with the Radar Relay. Tthis week has been ripe with office 2.0 news. There is so much that I’m going to do it in point-form:

• A web application designed to help people through their bankruptcies was cited for “practicing the law without a license” and its creator was charged and found guilty. The case is currently under appeal. (thanks to Kurzweilai.net for the link).
• The Office 2.0 Database tipped the scales at over 450 Office 2.0 startups. 95% of those will be gone in 36 months but who cares? As Paul Kedrosky says, “It takes a lot of dead bodies to fill a swamp” when you want to get to the other side.
• Gianpaolo gave us an 8-floor, 3-bullet point “Why SaaS for the Enteprise” pitch. I would add to his points the ability for users to pilot-test without IT involvement (which really rolls up to shorter time to value though). I think his 3 bullets are absolutely awesome. Concise, and to the point.
• The world continues to twitter about Twitter. Millions of people pinging each other with little tidbits of information on what they are doing at the moment. I know that many of the things that take off seem to confound people but you have to realize that deep down in biological and spiritual cores, we are social creatures. We are designed to be social from the ground up. But as people leave organized religion, and as fewer people get married, and as fewer people have kids, and as fewer people live in multi-family homes, there becomes a vast social vaccuum waiting to be filled – hence the explosion of blogs (find your community), photo-sharing (meet people with an appreciation for art), SMS’ing silly messages to each other, or signing up for Twitter – these are all manifestations of a desire to find and stay connected to a community in an ever more disconnected world.  I don’t doubt that we will develop a bunch of these tools along the way and will eventually be in partially aware, partially connected states to our communities at all time – but will be actually be social or have any friends? It reminds me of the quote I read the other day, “I unsubscribed from all of my social networks so that I would have time to invite friends over for dinners!” Also, here is a shortcut to using Twitter.
• Google’s diabolical plan to plant people in Microsoft is paying off. Microsoft has managed to make Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 both slow and destructive to data at the same time as Google has launched their applications with a service level agreement (that they breached already.) Lots of notes here on Zoli’s blog.
• Anne Zelenka posted “Ten Things I Hate About You, Web 2.0“. Funny list. Anne, how about Office 2.0? I’ll start with my top four most annoying things about Office 2.0:
• NOT ONE COMPANY has managed to make a text editor that doesn’t completely suck.
• Do we really need 50 spreadsheet apps? Are we really that lacking in creativity?
• Web 2.0 was about wasting time. Office 2.0 is really about being productive with your time. We need more web 2.0 in office 2.0 or the conferences are going to be REALLY dull.
• Just because you have an Office 2.0 company doesn’t mean you have to forget about: customers, pain points, revenues, or long-term viability.
• Phil Wainewright has a good post on the Saugatuck report showing that SaaS has hit the knee of the curve or as he writes: “SaaS hits the hockey stick.” I’m sure he meant the curvy part near the bottom of the stick near the big flat part that hits the little round thing-a-ma-jig. Go, Beavers, Go. As you can see, I’m not a hockey fan so I prefer the knee of the curve story a bit more. He writes: “Most surprising of all was a huge jump from 18% last year to 49% this
  year of companies planning to use SaaS for mission-critical
  applications.” I think it’s instructive to look at internet banking. People didn’t want t o use it either because they were afraid of the web – until seemingly overnight when everybody’s Grandma joined web-banking.
• Harry McCracken over at Slate wrote a decent review of the Zoho office tools suite. I agree with Harry that their suite seems pretty advanced. However, I have tried to use them for real work and have still found enough holes that I couldn’t use them. Particularly Zoho show which was nearly useless. The other apps seemed somewhat better. But they have achieved a heck of a lot and I wish Raju Vegesna and his team the best.
• AvenueA-Razorfish’s new Digital Outlook Report 2007 was released (thanks Guy Kawasaki for the heads up). Some highlights:
• “In retrospect, the massive digital disruption we’ve experienced over the last 12 months should have been anticipated. But it seems few were fully prepared for the speed and depth of the changes. Perhaps it’s because the changes weren’t just about what Web sites became popular or what new technologies were introduced. Rather, it was a broader cultural change. Consumers’ expectations of their media evolved. The places they trusted to provide information and entertainment changed. New outlets for consumers to express themselves emerged.”
• ““Great service. Creativity. Flexibility. A passion for their product and for finding ways to push innovation within their organization. A desire to understand clients’ objectives and not to retrofit them into their own. The hallmarks of great Web publishers are obvious, yet subjective and elusive. Those who are focused on delivering real solutions are best positioned to become partners to agencies and advertisers.” – Sarah Baehr, VP Media, New York.
• “Information seeking equals entertainment: Once upon a time, play was more deeply integrated into our daily lives, but that changed with the introduction of industrialism. Then came the Internet, and with it, a reemergence of play in new ways. Information as entertainment was a core concept we heard from our study participants, and one that we can see around us as well….Any way you look at it, play is back, and it’s here to stay.”
• “Mobile phone use will grow—but not for talking, according to our participants. Phones calls are considered to be invasive in this hyper-culture, to be used only when necessary. For ordinary use, a quick text message will suffice, and many of our respondents didn’t see themselves reversing this trend in the future.”
• Overall, this is a fantastic report. Get it. Read it. Take action on it.
• Dick Costolo wrote a great post titled Too Many Companies? where he addresses an entrepeneur’s question about whetehr or not he/she should go out and try to capitalize on a maket opportunity. I agree with Dick. You can’t know anything really when you start. It’s all a best guess. Once you have done the basics of identifying whether you are entiering what could be a high-growth market, something that you are passionate about, and that you have (or can soon have) a great team to build something with, then get out there and do it and adjust on the fly. Not wait until you “have it figured out”.
• Cisco bought Webex. For 64x earnings or  8.4x revenues. ($3.2B for 2006′s $50M earnings on $380M revenues). I agree with Michael Arrington who questions the value of such a deal when Webex is being disrupted SERIOUSLY by a lot of light, fast, cheap, and frankly much better competitors. Of course, Webex has real revenues that will accrue to Cisco’s bottom line and can actually “move the needle” on Cisco’s income statement. Hopefully they were buying the revenues and not the technology. I also agree with Paul Kedrosky who says “While this is not your father’s Cisco, it’s not clear just whose Cisco it is becoming either.” When they bought Five Across, it could have been an aberration. Adding Webex to the mix means it is definitely a trend. For it to make any sense, there would need to be some follow-on acquisitions that signal a clear shift in corporate strategy and a redefinition of what and who Cisco intends to become in the next few years.
• Darren Barefoot did a nice little review of three new-to-him Web apps: Harvest for simple time tracking, Buxfer for moving money easily, and WhosOff for tracking holidays in the office. Very fitting for the Office 2.0 Relay!

That’s a heck of a week!! Lots of interesting things happening and I’m sure we’ll have another crazy week next week as we get close to the actual Dealmaker event.

Have a great week ahead everybody!

• updating the interface in version 2.0 which was released around August 2006. It is indeed cleaner and simpler than the original one by a long shot. Nice job on that guys.
• releasing an open source distribution of the wiki;
• they released a mobile version (I have not looked at this);
• they released an offline sync tool that allows you to take all or part of the wiki with you offline, make changes, and then resync them. I haven’t tested it but that is a really cool feature. Now that we’re building out a lot of pages in our wiki at our office, I can see the value in having that ability, although as with all syncing/replication, the devil is in the details.
• Basic text-editing, the core of the application is still really really basic. Tables are not functional at all, with no real ability to move rows and columns.
• They have also announced that they are working with Dan Bricklin on combining Wiki Calc with Social Text to create Social Calc. I pointed out to Ross that if they are planning on using a spreadsheet tool to also be a table tool, that I’m not sure I believe it. They are different animals with different behaviours (or at least, traditionally they have been.) He is attempting to use Social Calc to be a universal sheet / table editor right within the main wiki page. It will be interesting to see if that bet pays off. I’m all for simplification and innovation. If they can combine the two into one functional sheet/table editing mode, good for them.

So, what does this all mean? Has my opinion changed? Well in the days since I wrote this, Atlassian and Socialtext have continued to grow at reasonable rates, and the market for corporate wikis has heated up. Some of their competitors have been aquired and gone into the horizontal layer (Jotspot into Google). And they are now being joined by companies like Jive Software with Clearspace or Blogtronix and SystemOne. It’s time for me to do a new vendor bake-off I think…. Until then, here is my one-line horribly opinionated overview of the vendors at the moment but I realize I’ll have to do them all justice by reviewing them more fully very soon. Here goes:

• Atlassian/Confluence: solid enterprise wiki with on-premise and hosted options; an ecosystem of partners who extend the wiki functionality; a solid team running the company that is focused on revenue AND profit; and a somewhat dated interface which they are addressing in the next release; extensive management tools; really solid exporting functions. I  recommend this product, despite its UI quirks as they are focused tightly on being profitable above all and on knowing who their customers are.
• Socialtext/Socialtext Workspace: many deployment options: hosted, on-premise, appliance; nice looking and intuitive interface; focused on solving the hard problems (mobile, offline) but slow in dealing with the fundamentals (the text editor is still really bad – tables are awful and functionality is very limited); have been early and loud proponents of wiki use in corporations; very supportive of the open source movement; are working to integrate in Social Calc – too little too late? Jotspot has spreadhseets, Google has Google sheets, Zoho Office has sheets, everybody has sheets; less obvious management and administration tools; If you need mobile and offline use, Socialtext is your only option. The text editing is limited and the lack of useful tables is a non-starter for me but maybe not for others. Also the only remaining appliance/wiki vendor now that Jot is out of the picture.
• Blogtronix: doing some very interesting work by combining blogs, wikis, and social networking for the enterprise. I have not reviewed them but a friend called the other day to say, “These guys are “coooooooooooool” so I’m intending to check them out soon.
• Jive Clearspace: a single platform that combines blogs, wikidoc module (for creating documents collaboratively), forums, document management, identity, and reputation into one seamless whole. Great visual design; solid fundamentals (they are the forum technology used by Apple, SAP, and Citrix for example); new product though so may have standard v1.0 issues; wiki functionality is really aimed at document creation rather than large-scale wiki development. I’m just reviewing the product now but haven’t made any final determinations at this time.

Stepping up to the bigger picture, there are two overall trends going on here. Much if not all of the features found in collaboration tools today is going to be heading either down into the horizontal players infrastructure (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM/Lotus), or else becoming features inside other industry categories (enterprise software for example!) Second, I believe we’re about to see the same pattern we saw with enterprise applications many years ago: the rise and fall of stand-alone applications and then the rise of comprehensive suites, particularly as consolidation hits. In the social software space, I think that will play out as applications becoming suites and both of them being consolidated into larger vendors quickly. It should be an interesting year or two ahead of us.

At the Angel forum, my friend Martin Bliemel and I have the good fortune of facilitating a day of investor pitches where 30+ companies will pitch 70-100 investors their idea for a new venture. The Angel Forum was founded in 1997 by Bob Chaworth-Musters and is now the oldest and largest angel group in Canada. To date, it has held 20 Angel Forums in Vancouver resulting in over $20M being raised for emerging companies..

My friend Debbie and her team at Dealmaker Media are running the “Under the Radar: Office 2.0” conference in Mountain View, CA on March 23, 2007. Aside from having been on the selection committee with some fine folks (Rod Boothby, Richard McManus, Zoli Erdos, Ismael Ghalimi, Stowe Boyd, Ori Weinroth, Brad Feld, and Rafe Needleman), some of whom I know, and others whom I have admired from a distance, I will also be presenting a customer perspective on why it’s imperative that we employ and deploy social software in the enterprise.

It should be an exciting day. We have a fantastic slate of presenting companies, Sean Wise and Rafe Needleman will be moderating, and we have a full panel of judges that will vote on the companies that have the most compelling businesses and offerings. Should be fun!

Resourcs: Event site, Powerpoint (not yet available)

Sibylle threw me out of the short distance group, so Blue and I joined the tail end of the long course team. Thankfully Doug was at the end doing sweep. Then I stopped to wait for Doug…and lost the group entirely. So I joined up with Ryan and Ellie…and we got lost. We backtracked and found Craig who led us….onto the short course.

Finally we intercepted the Long Coursers, lost Ryan and Ellie to the LC team and Craig, Blue and I ran on through the night in relative solitude enveloped in fog. When Craig and I were almost done the course, I was attacked by a pack of coyotes that ripped at my flesh. One by one, I beat them off me, and ran to catch up with Craig. [Update: Apparently somebody at the party spread rumours that there were no coyotes and that in fact I tripped into a prickle bush that tore up my leg and hands after doing my business in the bush - the nerve of some people!]

The run ended about 1h 30 min later back at William Griffin, and was followed by a quick trip to soak in the hot tub at Harry Jerome. Lo and behold, the hot tub was out of order. Or they saw us coming all covered in mud and decided to put the sign up to stop us from muddying up their hot tub!

So, never a group to be daunted by such a thing, we created a game of six person, four ball murderball in the pool, much to the dismay of the lone swimmer in Lane 1 who we seemed to graze more often than he wanted.

Murderball was followed by a fantastic potluck at Ean and Sibylle’s place. Unfortunately it looked like it was full swing when I had to hoof it back to get to bed so that I could get up early for a ride with a buddy.

Thanks for the great evening everybody!